Cold New World

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Cold New World

In Antarctica, Kim Stanley Robinson describes the region as "without laws, without sovereignty, without a military, without police, without economy, without autonomy, without sufficiency - without any of the properties needed in the world to make life real."

That is, at least until the early 21st century, when the Antarctic Treaty banning oil and mineral exploration expires, and an overcrowded globe hungry for fuel and fresh water turns its attention south. Interested parties include your basic profit-hungry northern oil concerns, along with southern developing nations like Chile and Namibia, which see Antarctic oil as a way to solve their energy problems and pay off their debts. A group of high tech environmentalists will have none of this, though, and plans a worldwide protest to call attention to the despoiling of the planet's last wilderness.

Yet Antarctica is no simple eco-thriller. As he did with the red planet in the Mars trilogy, Robinson presents Antarctica as a tabula rasa, where modern technology could allow people to create a utopia, if only they could agree how it should be structured. Luckily, his characters are quite prone to agreement, because Robinson wants to show us just how good life can be when thoughtful people come together to create a new non-nation that's good for the environment and for its people. Really, environmental degradation is only a side effect of what Robinson calls "Götterdämmerung capitalism." He makes it clear that he sees modern capitalism as destructive and dehumanizing, little different from feudalism, with an owner class getting ever richer off the workers and the earth. In this mode, he's kind of like a science fictional, but much more lyrical, Michael Moore.

While he insistently condemns growth capitalism and overpopulation, Robinson celebrates the continent's primary feature: its gargantuan landscape. A steaming caldera, crevasses, snowbridges, ice caves - the prose lovingly describes them all. Like a whiteout, the powerful landscape isolates the future Antarcticans; what was once a continent becomes, indeed, another planet, and dreams of living in harmony with nature and each other start to seem possible. Robinson's optimism is boundless. And it's catching.